Month: July 2019

Most people I know realize that for the past 10+ years the fall has been one of the busiest times of the year for me as trade show season ramped up for the IT workers in the US. This year will be no exception. The difference being that I am at a new company and have lots of different responsibilities now, including helping to organize our sponsored sessions for VMworld along with the rest of my team. This is where it actually got fun…

This year we were able to talk the powers that be at Cohesity into not taking the standard product pitch approach to VMworld sessions, nicely that also included community sessions that our team is involved in. This turned into 9 speaking sessions between full sessions and vBrownbag slots not to include the booth theatre. I am involved in 6 of the 9 and hopefully readers can come out to them.

I also am moderating a great customer panel with Wendy’s, Hyatt, Dolby and the San Francisco Giants all about their trials and tribulations around data protection from the days of tape to current backup and recovery solutions.

I have for over 10 years hosted the vExpert Daily which is a great panel discussion each day at 11am in the vBrownbag area. Thats has become a highlight of the week for sure. I also have another session in the vBrownbag area to talk about some Fraggle Rock.

The most important session I will be part of though is a full 60 min panel discussion on Work-Life Balance where we will present the results of a study we commissioned along with TechReckoning. If you haven’t filled it out, please do here. I am really looking forward to presenting the results, talking through the stories of burnout from the panel and the audience and bringing some awareness to something I know went through and still battle with and many of my readers have as well.

Often people ask me how much I travel and if you ask my friends at home you will probably hear numbers ranging from 50% to 80% but is that really accurate? I found that without real data thats hard to calculate so when I started needing to make sure that a team was not traveling over X% throughout the year I needed a way to know what that really meant.

There are quite a few things to consider and this is just a short list of them.

Do you count weekends?

Do you count holidays?

Are you traveling on back to back weeks?

Are you traveling on weekend days?

Do those weekend days count as work days?

I tried to account for all of these items along with the ebbs and flows of the year. You may travel more in the summer and fall but not as much in the winter time so the percentage is really throughout the whole year.

I created this google sheet to help me calculate the real times for the team. Be careful there are a lot of formulas throughout that are very easy to break but you should be able to make a copy and use it to your hearts content. I left a bunch of larger events in the master event list just to make everyones life a little easier.